*How do politicians secure top government positions? We exploit a natural experiment in the UK House of Commons, where politicians enter a lottery to win the opportunity to introduce legislation of their choosing. First, we verify that winning this lottery improves career outcomes, leading to a 65% (12 percentage point) increase in ministerial appointments five years after treatment. Next, we introduce a model of political capital that yields predictions about the legislation proposed by politicians. To verify predictions from our model, we use Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse the content of the bills presented by ballot winners. We provide evidence that politicians who strategically use this opportunity to push party objectives see a larger boost to their careers.

**This paper explores how Japanese exports' exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) has changed over the sample period from 2005 to 2023 and what has determined the changing ERPT, constructing the sector-specific explanatory variables from the financial data of each sector’s representative firms. First, we estimate the time-varying ERPT coefficients using the newly developed “sector-specific” and “contract currency-based” nominal effective exchange rate (NEER) of the yen for 50 machinery sectors. Second, we conduct a panel estimation to investigate how the time-varying estimates of ERPT coefficients are affected by the sector-specific explanatory variables, including the foreign sales ratio, R&D intensity, and labor productivity. Furthermore, since we have the time-varying ERPT coefficients for 50 machinery sectors from 2005 to 2023, we examine whether the ERPT coefficients are affected differently between the yen appreciation and depreciation periods. Since Japanese firms have long been exposed to large fluctuations in the yen’s exchange rates, our empirical results would have significant policy implications for Japanese firms’ foreign exchange risk management.